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“Bishop, take her to Miller. The jet is ready. All of you, go with her.” I stopped fighting when I realized it was no use. My muscles throbbed and every inch of myself ached. My arms swung around the back of Bishop’s neck where I clung on tightly. Silent sobs broke through again, and unable to contain them anymore, I let them flow. Te amo, frater.
“I don’t think she’s going to be ok,” Nate said, just as the seatbelt light turned off. She had fallen asleep long before take-off. We had waited for Spyder and Ollie to board the plane, both of them fucking around.
“What the fuck took you so long?” I asked Spyder, my eyes drifting to both him and a guilty looking Ollie. “If you tell me you were hitting on a chick, I swear to God, I will punch you.”
“Aw,” Spyder grinned, winking at me. “You and I both know I hit harder, little cos.”
“Our last fight was when I was five…”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“You make no sense.”
He pretended to think over what I had just said, then slowly smirked. “Exactly.”
I hated him.
I looked back to a nervous Nate. “She’ll be fine. It will take her a while, but she’ll pull through. If anyone can, it’s her.”
Nate squeezed his eyes closed. “I can’t ever see her in that kind of pain ever again, so you’re not allowed to die.”
“Ditto,” I muttered before Spyder’s voice stole my attention.
“We were helping your old man.” He tilted his head up to the ceiling, his eyes looking at me. “He has a lot to clean up after your girl there went firecracker and killed the only Steprum walking this earth.”
“She’s not the only one.” Nate shook his head, his finger running across his upper lip. “Scarlet was right, Katsia was lying. Tillie is her daughter, who is a Steprum, which means my kid is half Steprum.” His eyes closed again, I could see he was battling within himself to come to terms with everything he had just learned over the past few days.
“Well, shit,” Spyder grunted, closing his eyes. “I should have stayed around here, seems like more drama happens.”
“You can stay in New Orleans,” I corrected. My cousin and I were actually close, the banter was just what we always did since we were kids.
“I don’t know.” A slow smirk crept onto his mouth but his eyes stayed closed. “I might have just met a reason to stick around.” Ollie’s attention flew to where Tate was sitting, a smug, knowing look passing over his features.
“Of fucking course,” I snorted.
Brantley sat on the seat in front of us. “She’ll be ok, man. No one is as strong as that girl there.”
“That’s what I’m worried about, though,” Nate said, gesturing to where she was curled up under a blanket toward the back of the plane. “She shouldn’t have to deal with this bullshit. She fucking loved Daemon, man. Like full on fucking loved him. They shared a sibling bond that I had never seen before, and now he’s dead? I don’t know.” Nate shook his head. “I don’t know if she’ll come back from this. She barely came back from her little trip around the world stunt. She’s about to feel real loss, fucking crippling loss. Not the superficial kind, the fucking life shattering, earth moving kind. Not many people can survive it.”
Brantley looked at me. “She survived the shit that went on with my dad. She survived being fucking raped as a young girl, Nate. You’re wrong. That girl wasn’t born capable of dealing with that kind of loss, because she built the wall around herself to handle it, and do you know how she did that?” he asked, his eyes finally settling on Nate, who was watching him back eagerly. “By collecting every fucking brick that was thrown at her from this shitty life.”
Nate gulped. I swallowed, and Spyder’s eyes cracked open. “That’s some rough shit.”
Brantley’s eyes glassed over. “You have no idea.”
We all watched him, and it was like watching someone relive their most horrifying memories in full HD. Brantley was haunted every day by what his dad put them both through, and none of us truly knew the extent of it, but I did know that it was worse than what we knew. He refused to tell us anything else and lived with the shadows of it all every single day.
Ollie cleared his throat. “It was good to be back, I gotta admit, even though the circumstances were fucking shitty.”
“Ollie?” Nate muttered under his breath. “Stop fucking talking.” Those two cousins, on the other hand, flat out hated each other. Wasn’t sure why, Ollie seemed like a down to earth guy. As down to earth as you can get within us all. He lived to surf and had the jaw length blonde locks to go with it. He had the blue eyes and tattoos all over his skin to go with that, too. He looked like he had just fallen out of the set of The OC.